Paul Kagan

He graduated in 1965 with a degree in history. Following graduation he pursued a career as a commercial photographer, magazine art director and television news writer as well as a fine-art photographer. In the late 1960s he photographed the Monterey Pop Festival, the Human Be-In of 1967, and the People’s Park protests of 1969.

Paul Kagan studied at University of California, Berkeley. Work by Paul Kagan is recorded in the collections of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Smithsonian American Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum of California and Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Kagan exhibited his photographs at Stanford University in 1966 and the University of California Extension campus in San Francisco in 1973. He was in a group show at the Light Sound Dimension Gallery in one of the several Rolling Renaissance exhibitions in San Francisco in 1968. In the late 1960s Kagan shot a series of erotic photographs that were used by designers in rock concert posters. Designers who used his photos included Victor Moscoso and David Smith. These images became some of his most widely known work. Kagan also designed some posters of his own, including some of his photographs, for 1968 Avalon Ballroom concerts. He worked with Family Dog, a production company in San Francisco run by Chet Helms, which organized concerts. In 1966 Kagan photographed Country Joe and the Fish, and the images were used on four covers for albums released in 1967. Kagan’s photographs appeared in Rolling Stone magazine, the Berkeley Barb and Berkeley Tribe weekly newspapers, and on the cover of Ramparts magazine. They also appeared in the Night Times. Kagan's photographs were the subject of a retrospective exhibition in 2014 at the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami.